After Versailles we drove up to Normandy for the second stop on our trip. Our main goal was to see the D-Day beaches but also to have some quieter and more relaxing days. We stayed in a beautiful beach town called Honfleur, famous for its seafood and for being popular with impressionist painters. It somehow escaped destruction during all the wars and had buildings from the 16th-18th centuries along the harbor.
We had rented a more modern townhouse on vrbo, which was right across the street from the Honfleur Tennis Club so we could watch the players on the red clay from our balcony.
After settling in to our rental we headed out for dinner at a seafood place for some tasty oysters and mussels. Sadly we did not sample these huge crabs though the kids enjoyed watching them in the tank.
Sarah photobomb!
We loved walking around the narrow cobblestone streets in Honfleur and discovering the tiny passageways between buildings.
On Wednesday July 3 we took it easy and went for breakfast in the morning followed by a leisurely walk around the town. We stopped in to the church (Eglise Ste-Catherine) which was destroyed at one point and then rebuilt by the community of ship builders which is evident from the ceiling, which looks like the hull of a ship. It’s France’s largest wooden church and was built in the 15th century.
Blaine really wanted to light a candle so I helped him light one to my Mom-Mom, his great-grandmother, who would have liked it. The church also coincidentally has a relic from St. Theresa of the Little Flower which was the name of her nursing home she was living in when she died.
Outside the church there was a small farmers market going on so we picked up some vegetables, cheese, and eggs.
Back to the house for a simple lunch and some down time.
After lunch we went to the nearby Parc Zoologique to see some butterflies and birds. The kids were mostly interested in feeding the koi.
Then we walked over to the waterfront park with a “Jardin des Personalites” with busts of all the famous people who are from Honfleur, or even who just spent some time in Honfleur. 😀
The next day was July 4 and we’d planned to drive to see the various sites commemorating D-Day. Our first stop was at Utah Beach, which was an American landing site added late by Eisenhower. The museum is the most modern and had some great exhibits so we learned a lot. Utah was the most successful landing with only 197 casualties due to the success of the paratroopers and the advance bombings.
We started by seeing the memorials and beach, and then we went in to take in the museum.
We also got some espresso and water from the cafe “Le Roosevelt” named after Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Ted Jr, who was one of the generals leading the attack. We learned that the currents sent some of the boats off course so when they landed it was not according to plan but Roosevelt said, “We’ll start the war from right here!”
After Utah we decided to make a stop at Pont du Hoc, which is where the allies climbed the cliffs at night and took a strategic defensive position from the Germans in preparation for D-Day. It was a pretty spot but ended up being more walking than we’d anticipated, plus some of the sites were closed due to the cliffs eroding. In hindsight we probably would have skipped this stop!
Our third stop was Omaha, which was the American landing beach with the highest number of casualties (2400). We had some lunch right by the beach and then went on to see the American cemetery.
It was a long and tiring day so Andrew cooked some dinner back at our house that night. The next day we’d planned on more driving to see Mont St Michel and the Bayeux Tapestry, but we decided neither held that much interest for the kids and Andrew and I had seen them both before! So we decided to stay local and drive around the local beach towns, instead.
First we went to a nearby museum in the home of Erik Satie, a pianist and composer. The museum was wild, one large art installation.
Then we drove over to a larger beach town, Trouville, for lunch by the beach. It was fun to see the French tourists out for a beach day!
On the drive back we stopped to see another beach at Villerville.
In the meantime, we were waiting for word from our vrbo hosts on the status of our hot water in our rental! Backstory — the second night of our stay we started hearing a very loud noise periodically, and by the next day it was going every 5 minutes. They came and checked something but it hadn’t seemed to help and by the next day the hot water heater was broken! Turns out it was something major, so they moved us over to another, larger, property on the other side of town. It was an entire B&B and we had it all to ourselves. With the critical hot water we needed to do our laundry. 🙂
That night we had another delicious meal out and got some different views of the harbor.
On Saturday we hit this mini golf course, which was beautiful, and the kids went on the ropes course.
We walked through town to a fancy lunch at a place called L’Endroit, where I had delicious homard bleu.
Sarah was feeling a bit ill unfortunately so Andrew and the kids relaxed at our B&B and I checked out the Eugene Boudin museum solo. It had a nice little collection of impressionist paintings of the region, and was fun to see paintings of the beaches and Honfleur sites we’d been seeing the last few days. When I got back Andrew and Blaine went out to see the Maritime Museum and the carousel. We finished up all our laundry and packed up for our drive to Belgium.
The next morning we left for Belgium. En route we stopped for lunch and to see the beach and museum in Dunkirk, another important WWII site of the evacuation of troops in 1940.
